Intel has just released the Intel SSD 320 Series, currently represented by six products with capacities ranging from 40GB to 600GB. With this new line of solid-state drives (SSD), Intel’s goal is to expand the market in which the Intel X25M was so successful. Intel claims that the SSD 320 beats the Intel X25M in every way. In the semiconductor world, Moore’s law can help by increasing the computational power, or by lowering the price, or sometimes… both. For this review, I have compared the Intel SSD 320 with a few other products to see how it really performs.
While computer storage might not be as exciting as processors, it is a critical component of overall system performance. Right now, a transition from a mechanical drive to a solid-state drive is often the single best possible upgrade to significantly increase perceived performance on new, or even older systems. Raw performance is great, but for most consumers, storage has to be a proper blend of performance, storage capacity and reliability.
Performance is what makes SSDs so popular. Unlike hard disk drives (HDD) that require spinning discs at high speeds (5400rpm-15000rpm) with heads moving just above it. SSDs do not require any mechanical components and that’s key when it comes to pure performance, because it makes accessing a bunch of small files so much faster. There’s no mechanical motion, everything happens (almost) at the speed of light. That is why operating systems boot faster etc… there are simply tons of small files involved in your daily computing.
But all SSDs are not equal. Some use slower or faster flash memory, and most importantly, some have smarter controllers than others. The controller is the chip that reads and write the data to/from the system memory to the SSD drive. Here are some numbers but note that as a reference, I’ve thrown in a Seagate 750GB hard disk (very popular in its time) and a Western Digital Velociraptor HDD, one of the fastest available to consumers.
Before looking at those charts, please note that I have used the MSRP for the Intel SSD 320 300GB, which is $529. I suspect that the street price will be lower, so I might revise the charts in the near future, bu you get the idea (hopefully). The other products have known street prices, so I used those.
To be fair, some of the values can’t be easily measured. For instance, Intel estimates that the SSD 320 Series can save hundreds of dollars on the total cost of ownership for a business (if you account for the cost associated with dead hard drives etc). If can’t vouch for that but it is usually not a concern for consumers, but enterprises would probably take a closer look.
I did not have a hard disk die on me for many years, and as drives have been built with a longer average time before failure, it’s pretty tough to test this one. However, the Intel 320 Series has a few features that should make it more reliable:
– Redundant NAND memory: in case some memory cells fail
– Power outage protection: the drive has enough power to complete all in-flight data writes
The Intel SSD 320 comes with hardware 128-bit AES encryption. This is similar to what is being used to secure financial transactions over the Internet. It could prove to be very useful if the drive is in a lost/stolen laptop, or if it is taken away from a desktop PC host.
The Intel SSD 320 has been created to be Intel’s main SSD workhorse, and it is truly better than the X25M in every aspect: reliability, performance, capacity and even price. The reliability has been improved with data protection features and the storage capacity has been lifted to a maximum of 600GB (versus 160GB for the X25M). On the performance level, the Intel SSD 320 beats its predecessor handily and all that for a price that should be inferior per GB. In short, it’s better, faster, and cheaper.